circumstance; they were Catholics, and
even so lately as in their boyhood Catholic land-owners were
comparatively few.

John Redmond was four years older than his younger brother, born in
1861. He got his schooling under the Jesuits at Clongowes in early days,
before the system of Government endowment by examination results had
given incentive to cramming. According to his own account he did little
work and nobody pressed him to exertion. But the Jesuits are skilful
teachers, and they left a mark on his mind. It is scarcely chance that
the two speakers of all I have heard who had the best delivery were
pupils of theirs--Redmond and Sir William Butler. They taught him to
write, they taught him to speak and to declaim, they encouraged his
natural love of literature. His taste was formed in those days and it
was curiously old-fashioned. His diction in a prepared oration might
have come from the days of Grattan: and he maintained the old-fashioned
habit of quotation. No poetry written later than Byron, Moore and
Shelley made much appeal to him, save the Irish political ballads. But
scarcely any English speaker quoted Shakespeare in public so often or so
aptly as this Irishman.

From Clongowes he went to Trinity College, Dublin, where he matriculated
in October 1874 at the age of seventeen. His academic studies seem to
have been half-hearted. At the end of a year his name was taken off the
College books by his father, but was replaced. At the close of his
second year of study, in July 1876, it was removed again and for good.

But apart from what he learnt at school, his real education was an
apprenticeship; he was trained in the House of Commons for the work of
Parliament. He was a boy of fifteen, of an age to be keenly interested,
when the representation of Wexford passed from his great-uncle to his
father. Probably the reason why he was removed from Trinity College was
the desire of Mr. William Redmond to have his son with him in London.
Certainly John Redmond was there during the session of 1876, for on the
introduction of Mr. Gladstone's second Home Rule Bill he recalled a
finely apposite Shakespearean quotation which he had heard Butt use in a
Home Rule debate of that year. In May 1880 his father procured him a
clerkship in the House. The post to which he was assigned was that of
attendant in the Vote Office, so that his days (and a great part of his
nights) were spent in the two little rooms which open off the Member